A multi-hop network suffers from the adverse effect of cumulative degradation as a path from source to destination traverses numerous router-switches. The mean number of hops decreases sharply as the dimension of the deployed router switches is increased. The decrement in the number of hops, coupled with the changing economics of signal transport can lead to a much simplified, powerful, and highly efficient telecommunication network.
A switching-routing apparatus is typically implemented as a multi-stage switching system and its complexity, performance, and cost are influenced by the number of switching processes within the apparatus. It is desirable to explore alternative structures of switching-routing devices which permit scalability while providing operational simplicity, high performance, overall efficiency, and ease of expansion.
There is a need for a flexible router-switch, which scales gracefully from a capacity of multiple gigabits per second (for example 160×109 bits/second) to a capacity of the order of multiple petabits per second. Deployment of such a router-switch enables the construction of a global broadband network of virtually unlimited capacity while significantly reducing the number of hops between any two access points on the planet to an acceptable upper bound. The sought router-switch preferably accommodates individual connections of widely varying granularities, ranging from a few kilobits per second to multiple gigabits per second per user in order to form the basis of an economical broadband network of global coverage.